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While imperial palaces appear to dominate this portrayal of the first Portuguese ambassador presenting credentials in Beijing in the sixteenth century, the painting also highlights the bridges along the Outer and Inner Golden Streams of the Forbidden City.© The Trustees of the British Museum.
FOREWORD
Crossing a bridge today—eyes on the traffic and mind already on the other side—it is too easy to pass over the span without reflecting on its engineering, its aesthetics, and its history. With their studies of the diverse traditions of bridge building, the “wind-and-rain” bridges of Guangxi, the white marble stonework of imperial bridges in the capital, the soaring covered bridges of southern Zhejiang, author Ronald Knapp and photographer Chester Ong have created a book that shows us how to pay attention. Like so many others who have become interested in material culture and local society, I have learned to look forward to Ron Knapp’s next book on Chinese vernacular architecture. Chinese Bridges is a worthy successor to his previous work in this series, Chinese Houses.
Bridges are good metaphors. They join what is separated; they increase communication; they facilitate circulation; they are social and cultural constructions. The vernacular architecture of China is a visual bridge to the social and political worlds out of which it emerged. Bridges are anchored to the valley walls and the streambeds they traverse, and they are also anchored in the communities that build them. Even today, when local government is responsible for the infrastructure of travel, it is not hard to find rural towns where bridges are built by collecting donations from the residents. I remember the stone stele that recorded the gifts of five and ten yuan that paid for the most basic of bridges, the rough granite slabs that bridged the stream dividing a village in the mountains of Zhejiang’s Dongyang. I am not sure that it was the size of the donation that required the stele, although it was a time and place when even a few yuan were of consequence; rather, it was the fact of a shared, and successful, communal endeavor that was being celebrated.
Slabs across a stream can facilitate community building. The merchants displaying their wares in the famous depiction of Song-dynasty Kaifeng’s rainbow bridge were going where the people were. But many of the covered bridges we see here were also built as public spaces, attracting people to gather in the comfortable shade, cooled by the breezes sweeping over the summer river. Often they were religious sites as well. Obviously, bridge shrines asked gods to protect the bridge, but sometimes these shrines— a bridge being a well-trafficked spot—brought worshippers to the deity. Not a few bridges were also teahouses. The county towns of Yongkang and Wuyi in Zhejiang have restored their old covered bridges to great effect. Walking across I have found myself among the relaxing crowds—of old men playing cards, of families with children, of musicians with their instruments—and there were even a few people who were simply trying to cross the river.
Today, many old bridges have become architectural monuments. Consider the arching covered bridges in Taishun, amply illustrated in this volume, in the hill country along the Zhejiang-Fujian border, an area I know well. These are not quite bridges to nowhere—we can still see that they were once nodes in the networks of narrow imperial highways—but the modern road system has made the old roads and bridges far less relevant. Looking down to the river-bed, I see the marks of old foundations; the current bridge seems to be the third or fourth incarnation of a bridge at this spot. Historians tell us that many of these elegant bridges were built by lineages not for their own travel but as an investment: a more convenient bridge could shift trade routes through their villages, to their profit. Villages and roads come and go, and so do bridges.
And that brings us to the problem of preservation. The aesthetics of many bridges justifies their preservation, however impractical they have become. It ought to be obvious that aesthetic goals figured centrally in the construction of these bridges in the first place. The are works of art and engineering. Many of the bridges depicted in this volume will be preserved, restored today as a memory of the past rather than for their practical utility. But many that are not here will be lost. This volume should inspire us, as we travel through China, to look for bridges, to photograph them, to draw attention to them, and perhaps to help preserve them.
Peter Bol
Harvard University
Part One
CHINA’S ANCIENT BRIDGE BUILDING TRADITIONS
Travelers follow a narrow road along a winding mountain stream before crossing a common bridge in this Daoist-inspired landscape of piled mountains infused with mist. Qing dynasty. © Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution,
